OPINION: Black America, Do You Recognize This Man?

I used to keep a tight look on my face whenever the intro to Public Enemy’s “Night Of The Living Baseheads” played because they start that song with audio from Louis Farrakhan who’s saying about Black people that we’ve “lost our religion, our culture, our God…”

Well, yeah, we lost all those things. We’re still losing things to this day. And I mean, not just misplacing them, we’re losing them like we never even had them.

Enter James Marshall Hendrix. He’s gone too. So gone, that I was once listening to one of those moronic music video television channels that was not BET and they were saying something along of the lines of “Jimi embraced his white side…” I started screaming “What white side??? The (N-Word) had TWO Black Parents!”

But that’s part of the brilliance of American Racism, I guess. It pulls the old George Orwell trick on you of making you believe that the thing you had up until five minutes ago was never yours to begin with. So when we go to mixed college parties and we hear Bob Marley (also gone) and Jimi, we might recognize Bob as the guy that made good “high” music for white boys but we don’t know Jimi at all. And who’s fault is that?

Oh, but I haven’t even told you who Jimi Hendrix is yet, huh? Google him, for Christ’s (also gone) sake! Check out his Wikipedia page. The man was the greatest guitarist of all-time and he was Black and if you can name more than three of his songs you either grew up around white people or you have really, really eclectic taste.

I’ll give you a few videos here at the bottom to get you started, but you’re really gonna have to do the bulk of this assignment on your own, friends. It’s worth it. At this rate, somebody like Zac Efron is gonna star in “All Eyez on Me-The Story of Tupac Shakur” and nobody’s gonna think there’s anything wrong with that at all.